Appointment conversion calculator

Contacts per closed job is the number to argue about

The three stage rates each describe one handoff. Contacts per closed job describes the whole machine, and it is the figure that survives a change in how anybody counts. Multiply the three rates together and you get the same thing expressed as a percentage; divide one by it and you get the number of conversations behind each job. That is the unit a floor manager can staff against, because conversations are the thing a dialer and a headcount actually produce.

It also settles a recurring argument cheaply. When set rate rises and contacts per closed job does not move, the extra appointments were not real appointments -- they moved the count at the top and fell out at hold or at close. That pattern is the single most common way an appointment program looks like it is improving while producing exactly the same revenue, and one ratio makes it visible in a month rather than a quarter.

Watch the direction over several months rather than the level in one. A single month is a small sample of a noisy process, and the level depends entirely on definitions that vary from shop to shop.

Define the four counts before you trust any of them

A right-party contact is a conversation with the person who can agree to an appointment. It is not a dial, not a connect, and not a voicemail, and the difference is not pedantry: a set rate computed over dials and a set rate computed over right-party contacts can differ by an order of magnitude while both are called "set rate" in the same meeting. Pick one, write it down, and make the export match it.

Held means a rep ran the appointment. Cancellations, no-shows and reschedules that never happened are not held, and counting a reschedule as held is how a hold rate becomes flattering and useless in the same edit. Closed means a signed job traceable to that appointment, not a proposal out and not a verbal.

The four counts are nested -- every held appointment was set, every set appointment came out of a contact -- so a later stage that comes out larger than an earlier one is a counting defect and the calculator says so instead of quietly correcting it. Nearly always it is a period boundary: appointments set at the end of one month and held at the start of the next, counted against the wrong denominator.

Why the contact count has a hard ceiling

Contacts per closed job is only actionable if contacts can be bought. On the outbound side they largely cannot be bought past a point, because the window is set by federal rule rather than by ambition. Under the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, outbound telemarketing calls to a residence are permitted from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time at the called person location. Source: FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 CFR 310.4(c), https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-310/section-310.4. This is a description of published rules, not legal advice.

The load-bearing words are local time at the called person's location. A floor dialing east of its own time zone loses the end of its evening block before its own clock says so, and evening is where a homeowner is most likely to be a right-party contact at all. When the ceiling on contacts is fixed, the only lever left is conversion -- which is what makes the three stage rates worth measuring rather than merely reporting.

Worked example, using the numbers the page loads with

The calculator opens with four hundred right-party contacts, a hundred appointments set, seventy held, and twenty-one jobs closed. Divide each stage into the one above it and the set rate is twenty-five percent, the hold rate is seventy percent, and the close rate is thirty percent. Multiply the three together, or divide contacts by jobs closed directly, and the funnel comes out to five and a quarter percent of contacts becoming a signed job -- one in just over nineteen contacts.

Contacts per closed job is the three stage rates multiplied together and inverted, so the three are interchangeable in one precise sense: the same proportional lift to any single rate buys the same proportional drop in contacts-per-closed-job. Lifting the hold rate from seventy to eighty-five percent (a jump of about a fifth) does exactly as much for the funnel as the same one-fifth jump in the set rate, from twenty-five to thirty percent -- either one alone takes contacts-per-closed-job from about nineteen to about sixteen. The choice of which to chase is not about leverage, then; it is about which stage is genuinely cheaper to move in your own operation.

Where this fits

• B2B appointment setting services explained -- the same funnel in prose, including what a vendor is and is not promising when they quote a set rate.
• Roofing insurance claim call center -- why qualification at the set stage is what moves the hold rate, rather than reminders at the end.
• Storm damage appointments -- appointments bought by the batch, where hold rate is the number that decides whether the batch was worth it.
• Outbound call center -- the operation that produces the contacts this calculator starts from.
• Call center cost estimator -- put a price on those contacts and the ratio above turns into a cost per closed job.